Comments On The Character Of Iago
 Othello was everything to Iago, because war was everything; passed over, Iago is nothing, and in
warring against Othello, his war is against ontology
 If I were a director of Othello, I would instruct my Iago to manifest an ever-growing wonder and
confidence in the diabolic art.
 Iago playfully invokes a “Divinity of Hell,” and yet he is no mere Diabolist. He is War Everlasting.
 Iago, forever beyond Othello’s understanding, is not beyond ours, because we are more like Iago
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than we resemble Othello; Iago’s views on war, on the will, and on the aesthetics of revenge
inaugurate our own pragmatics of understanding the human.
It is not persuasive to say that Othello is a normal man and Iago abnormal; Iago is the genius of
his time and place, and is all will. His passion for destruction is the only creative passion in the
play.
There can be no question concerning Iago’s primacy in the play; he speaks eight soliloquies,
Othello only three.
Iago’s failure to encompass his wife’s best aspect-her love for and pride in Desdemona- is the one
lapse for which he cannot forgive himself. That is the true undersong of the last lines he will ever
allow himself to utter, and which are dedicated as much to us as to Othello or to Cassio: V,ii,298301
Where he ought to have been at his most discerning-within his marriage-Iago is blank and blind.
The superb psychologist who unseamed Othello, and who deftly manipulated Desdemona, Cassio,
Roderigo and all others, angrily falls into the fate he arranged for his prime victim, the Moor, and
he becomes another wife murderer. He has, at last, set fire to himself.
With Hamlet, we confront the ever-growing inner self, but Iago has no inner self, only a fecund
abyss, precisely like a descendant, Milton’s Satan, who in every deep found a lower deep opening
wide.
No villain in all literature rivals Iago as a flawless conception, who requires no improvement.
Swinburne was accurate: “the most perfect evildom, the most potent demi-devil,” and “a
reflection by hell-fire of the figure of Prometheus.”
Since the plot of Othello essentially is Iago’s plot, improvisation by Iago constitutes the tragedy’s
heart and centre.
Hazlitt’s analysis of Iago’s improvisatory genius is most superb when it observes that Iago “stabs
men in the dark to prevent ennui.” That prophetic insight advances Iago to the Age of Baudelaire,
Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky, an Age that in many respects remains our own.
Iago’s greatness is that he is out ahead of us, though every newspaper and television newscast
brings us accounts of his disciples working on every scale, from individual crimes of
sadomasochism to international terrorism and massacre. Iago’s followers are everywhere.
Othello is a Christian, by conversion; Iago’s religion is war, war everywhere – in the streets, in the
camp, in his own abyss. Total war is a religion.
Iago says that he has never found a man who knew how to love himself, which means that selflove is the exercise of the will in murdering others. That is Iago’s self-education in the will, since
he does not start out with clear intention of murder. In the beginning was a sense of having been
outraged by a loss of identity, accompanied by the inchoate desire to be revenged upon the god
Iago has served.
Shakespeare’s finest achievement in Othello is Iago’s extraordinary mutations, prompted by his
acute self-overhearing as he moves through his eight soliloquies and their supporting asides.
Iago is not the Christian devil or a parody thereof, but rather a free artist of himself, uniquely
equipped, by experience and genius, to entrap spirits greater than his own in a bondage founded
upon their inner flaws. (All the above from Bloom)
"Our ancient" is a philosopher, who fancies that a lie that kills has more point in it than an
alliteration or an antithesis; who thinks a fatal experiment on the peace of a family a better thing
than watching the palpitations in the heart of a flea in a microscope; who plots the ruin of his
friends as an exercise for his ingenuity, and stabs men in the dark to prevent ennui. His gaiety,
such as it is, arises from the success of his treachery; his ease from the torture he has inflicted on
others. He is an amateur of tragedy in real life; and instead of employing his invention on
imaginary characters, or long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more desperate course
of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his nearest friends and
connections, and rehearses it in down-right earnest, with steady nerves and unabated resolution.
(Hazlitt)
The tragedy is not just Othello’s; it is also Iago’s. Iago is as much a tragic figure as any of
Shakespeare’s protagonists, as much caught between one world and another, one way of thinking
and another. (Fintan O’Toole)
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Iago’s brilliance lies not in what he puts into Othello’s mind, but what he draws out of it. (Fintan
O’Toole)
Iago is so filled with sexual disgust and hatred of women that he cannot think of either sex or
women without thinking of animals. (Fintan O’Toole)
Iago’s fascination for us combines equal parts of admiration and horror. Admiration for his
cunning, his resourceful opportunism, his street-smart confidences, his public charm. Horror at
the envious fury raging inside that cool exterior which drives him to shrivel with his caustic
cynicism and destroy with his murderous indifference anyone and anything with qualities beyond
his grasp. His reaction to Cassio – “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly” – says
it all. (Maynard Mack)
Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the character of Iago.
To compare Iago with the Satan of Paradise Lost seems almost absurd, so immensely does
Shakespeare’s man exceed Milton’s fiend in evil.
The inference, which is accompanied by a thrill of admiration, that Iago’s dissimulation and selfcontrol must have been prodigious: for he was not a youth, but had worn this mask for years, and
he had apparently never enjoyed occasional explosions of the reality within him.
The tragedy of Othello is in a sense his tragedy too. It shows us not a violent man, like Richard,
(Richard III) who spends his life in murder, but a thoroughly bad man, cold man, who is at last
tempted to let loose the forces within him, and is at once destroyed.
Indeed, in intellect (always within certain limits) and in will (considered as a mere power, and
without regard to its objects) Iago is great. To what end does he use these great powers? His creed
– for he is no sceptic, he has a definite creed – is that absolute egoism is the only proper and
rational attitude, and that conscience or honour or any kind of regard for others is an absurdity
Only once does he appear to say something of the truth. It is when he uses the phrase, “To plume
up my will in double knavery”. To ‘plume up the will’, to heighten the sense of power or
superiority – this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of cruelty which evidently do
not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most…The
boy who…without any hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with the victim’s pain, not from
any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly because this pain is the unmistakable
proof of his own power over his victim. So it is with Iago. His thwarted sense of superiority wants
satisfaction.
But Iago, finally, is not simply a man of action; he is an artist. His action is a plot, the intricate
plot of a drama, and in the conception and execution of it he experiences the tension and the joy
of artistic creation. (The above from A.C.Bradley)
Iago's soliloquy—the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity—how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is
still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view,—for the lonely
gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil,—and yet a character which Shakespeare has
attempted and executed, without disgust and without scandal! (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
It is plain that what we should see in Iago’s prompt success is not so much Iago’s diabolic intellect
as Othello’s readiness to respond. Iago’s power, in fact, in the temptation- scene is that he
represents something that is in Othello – in Othello the husband of Desdemona: the essential
traitor is within the gates.
Considered as a comprehensively villainous person, he represents a not uncommon kind of
grudging, cynical malice (and he’s given, at least in suggestion, enough in the way of grievance
and motive). (Above – F.R.Leavis)
In the last scene Iago is silent. Why should he talk? Everything has become clear. The world has
fallen, but for Othello, not for him. They will crush his bones, but he can triumph. The torture and
death of Iago do not restore justice; they do not serve any purpose, and happen outside the play,
as it were, even in the literal sense. But Iago wins not only on the intellectual plane of the tragedy;
he wins in its very fabric and texture, in its language.
Iago believes in will-power. One can make everything of oneself, and of other people. Others, too,
are only an instrument. They can be moulded like clay. Iago, like Richard III, despises people
even more than he hates them. Says Iago: The world consists of villains and fools; of those who
devour and those who are devoured. People are like animals; they copulate and eat each other.
The weak do not deserve pity, they are just as abominable, only more stupid than the strong. The
world is vile.
Of course, Iago is a Machiavellian, but machiavellism merely means for him a generalized
personal experience. Fools believe in honour and love. In reality there is only egoism and lust.
The strong are able to subordinate their passions to ambition. One’s own body can also be an
instrument. Hence Iago’s contempt for everything that benumbs a man, from moral precepts to
love.
Iago is an accomplished stage-manager. “Thou has set me on a rack” (III,iii) He has proved that
the world consists of fools and villains. He has destroyed all around him, and himself. He goes to
be tortured in a tragedy devised by himself. He has proved that neither the world nor himself
deserves any pity. (Above – Jan Knott)
Comments on the Character of Othello
 “O, fool, fool, fool!” – The mere sight of such beauty and nobility and happiness,
all wickedly destroyed, must be a harrowing one. Yet the pity and terror of it
come short of serving for the purgation of our souls, since Othello’s own soul
stays unpurged…But what alchemy can now bring the noble Moor and the savage
murderer into unity again? The “cruel tears” and the kiss and the talk of justice
are more intolerable than the savagery itself. Nor can remorse bridge-though too
late-the gulf between the two; they were and remain beings apart.